Conservative blogger Sean Hackbarth observed, “This is Google’s most aggressive attempt at reaching out to the conservative movement. I saw an effort first-hand at the 2008 GOP convention when Eric Schmidt had a meet-and-greet with conservative webloggers. It went fine, but there was no follow-up. The distance and distrust between the company and the right continued.

“Throwing money around and talking up G+ won’t be enough to connect,” Hackbarth predicts. “They have to make a concerted effort towards activists, take their concerns and issues serious, and answer their questions when they’re having problems with Google services.”

As an “oh by the way,” Google spent approximately $390,000 (out of $3,760,000.00 total) on SOPA and PIPA lobbying, which included attempts to educate lawmakers on SOPA and the DMCA. The filing with the Federal Election Committee is available online in a PDF here.

ChiComs cut Internet over Tibetan unrest

When newspapers and radio were the only means of mass communication, it was easy for the Chinese Communists to censor and control the dissemination of whatever was happening within their borders. Today, all they have to do is pull the plug. And that’s what the Chinese government has done, cutting off the Internet and mobile phone signals for 30 miles around the scene where many were shot dead amid clashes in Tibetan Sichuan. It’s not the first time China has put up a “great wall.”

The Academy of Arts and Sciences has decided to use computerized voting for the 2013 Oscars, switching from paper to electronic ballots. But that has many computer experts concerned that this leaves the Oscar voting process open to hacking and other methods of foul play. Here’s what they’re saying.

This year’s 84th Academy Awards ceremony will take place Feb. 26 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California, and will be televised on ABC.

U.K. Sun says tweets and blogs threaten its future

If you’re still taking the paper, have you noticed how much it has shrunk? The numbers of pages and their actual size, along with readership and advertising dollars, are rapidly reducing.

“We are competing for eyeballs with social media,” says Dominic Mohan, editor of The Sun. Twitter and celeb-focused blogs are giving newspapers like The Sun a run for their money, providing immediate scandal items and other news content once exclusively the realm of the tabloids and other papers.

It’s the age-old reason: Privacy. Privacy? On Twitter??? Yep, teens have realized that Facebook allows Mom and Dad and Grandma and other family members to see what they’re posting. Twitter, on the other hand, allows them to use pseudonyms and lock their accounts so only friends have access. It’s where they can fly anonymously, something young adults crave.

Twitter is oh, so enticing …

What’s more tempting than sex or sleep? Believe it or not, experts who measure these things say it is tweeting. Really. It’s low cost, low risk and easy to do anywhere.

“A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business that conducted an experiment with more than 200 people to try to gauge what tempts them most. Lead researcher Wilhelm Hofmann explained to the Guardian that the participants, located in the German city of Wurtzburg, were pinged seven times a day via their BlackBerrys and asked to report any desires they had experienced in the past 30 minutes, as well as the intensity of each want.”

Speaking of money, how does Facebook derive its revenue? Major advertisers like game maker Zynga and movie provider Netflix. Eight-five percent of FB’s revenue in 2011 came from ads, with the remaining 15 percent from payments and other fees.

Men are more likely to send friend requests; women are more likely to receive them. And most Facebook users get more out of it than they put into it, an enticement to keep coming back.

Yet despite women being a larger percentage of Facebook users, there are no women represented on its seven-man board of directors. Why is that?

According to Tech Crunch, Hitwise says Facebook.com is now claiming one out of every eleven visits in the U.S., and one out of five page views online in the U.S., takes place on Facebook.com. Twenty percent of page views in the U.S. happen on Facebook. The average visit time is 20 minutes. More interesting stats here.

“There are more than two billion global Internet users,” Facebook’s S-1 filing states, “and we aim to connect all of them.” Facebook says it has some countries with above 80-percent penetration rates among users.

And finally, the Winklevoss twins who claim they invented Facebook and went to court over it, are delighted at the IPO news. They took their settlement in Facebook stock, which now could be worth some $225 million.

“Smart phones and tablets are upsetting the PC order; social applications are impinging on traditional ‘workforce productivity’ and communications applications,” according to Alan S. Cohen, Vice President of Marketing at Nicira. But it’s much more than that. Technology and software is changing the way we interact with the Internet. And what we’re using today will be as ancient history as the first PC is now.

He’s come up with a way to summarize online content. His app is called “Summly,” and you can get it here. A simpler way to browse and search the Internet. This simple little app has made this 16-year-old programmer poised for success. Watch the video in which he sums it up. Succinctly.

Congratulations to WND readers Erin Meyer of Bridgewater, Conn., and Dan Page of Hampton, N.Y., who were among the first to correctly guess actress Doreen Lang in her portrayal of a hysterical mother in the diner in the 1963 Hitchcock thriller “The Birds.” The film was based on the novel by Daphne DuMaurier.